The Decay of the Angel by Yukio Mishima
Published 1971 · 62,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Philosophical Fiction
How hard is The Decay of the Angel to read?
The Decay of the Angel scores 80 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 68 out of 100
- Buddhist doctrinal vocabulary, maritime signalling terminology and the elevated diction of Mishima's late style, rendered by Seidensticker with the register intact.
- Sentence structure: 66 out of 100
- Long, controlled sentences and extended descriptive passages, particularly in the harbour chapters, with dialogue that operates by implication.
- Abstraction: 84 out of 100
- The novel argues about consciousness, illusion and the emptiness of phenomena, and stages its whole conclusion as a metaphysical proposition delivered in a temple garden.
- Information density: 66 out of 100
- It depends on three preceding novels the reader must hold in mind, plus Buddhist doctrine on the five signs of a deva's decay from which it takes its title.
- Narrative indirection: 80 out of 100
- Honda's lifelong pattern of recognition is put in doubt from the first chapter and demolished in the last, so the reader must reconsider four novels' worth of evidence supplied by a narrator who may have imagined all of it.
- Symbolic density: 86 out of 100
- The signal station watching for ships that may not come, the three moles, the five signs of decay, the empty garden and the tetralogy's title — the dry Sea of Fertility on the moon — converge in the final pages.
- Ironic distance: 84 out of 100
- The chosen incarnation is a vicious, ordinary boy who survives past twenty in blind mediocrity; the wise old observer is exposed as an arrested voyeur; and a lifetime of transcendent pattern is dismissed by an abbess in one polite sentence.
- Resolution withholding: 92 out of 100
- The most radical withholding in modern Japanese fiction: the final scene cancels the premise of four novels without confirming that it is a cancellation, and closes on a garden where, in the last words, there is nothing at all.
- Structural complexity: 74 out of 100
- A short volume that functions as the load-bearing keystone of a four-book cycle, reversing sixty years of narrative in a ten-page conversation.
How The Decay of the Angel is regarded
The Decay of the Angel holds a literary regard score of 78 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.